Saturday, March 21, 2009

A while ago Eli went to the mattress with Atmoz over blankets. It was pointed out that there are styles in science and the bunny's is to do illustrative experiments. If they carry Darwin credit, so much the better. It's not for nothing that chemistry is called stinks and bangs and physics shocks and explosions. If we wanted to play safe we would have taken up financial futures. Which, come to think of it, is what the theoreticians did in case you have any questions about why the world is in an economic mess.

Eli will rewrite this for the G&T response, and there are some refinements that have to be made (for one thing we have to measure the temperature of the upper and lower surfaces of the glass) and it has to be done in vacuum, just as gravityloss pointed out, also take a look at the blanket wars posts) but he thought some would be interested.

The lab bunnies started with a heating plate, fed at ~40 VAC through a Variac. Eli placed a couple of thin glass tubes on this and a large glass plate about the some size as the heating plate on top of that. You have to look carefully to see the plate, but you can find the greenish tinged edge. This heated up to ~166 C at equilibrium. Couple of caveats. The temperature varied ~2 C over 5-10 minutes, the thermocouple used to measure temperature is the blue wire to the left, the plate is a 2" diffusion pump heater, the glass tubes Pasteur pippets and the glass plate a large cheap lens from lord knows where. You use what you got.

Eli then grabbed the glass plate with his hands (One of the skills you pick up after forty years in the lab is a certain ability to touch hottish things. Comes in handy in restaurants) and removed it. The temperature rapidly decreased to 151 C in a minute. BTW, Eli is insensitive, but he can't pick up anything much over 70 C without illegal asbestos glass blowers gloves.

9 comments:

Anonymous
said...

elirabett,i am walter-in-fallschurch. i am having a "discussion" over on capitalweather with brian valentine and bob ryan about global warming. i'm sorry if this is off topic. frankly i can't quite understand most of the posts here - but that's the point. i'm looking for some real scientists...

i presume you've heard of "project steve". i thought project steve was such a clever and funny way to “rebut” the obvious “denial” of the case/truth for the “scientific consensus” on evolution. (and those denialists LOVE lists!) i’m almost sure a similar consensus exists in the case of “global warming”. the percentage may not be 99% like in project steve, but it must be up there. i’m not a scientist so i can’t go around to my friends and have them sign this silly list. CAN YOU SUGGEST A FORUM for the idea of maybe a “PROJECT JIM” (for james hanson) for global warming? you have to pick a name with about 1% of the population (of scientists), hopefully in homage to important global warming scientist.

would you start such a thing? if not, do you know of some scientist with a sense of humor who would do it?

Welders gauntlets will do the trick. You don't need asbestos. I've handled objects over 100C without any trouble. After some lab time and playing with fire, I can now scare people by reaching into campfires and extracting burning logs with my bare hands- you just need to know where the heat is.

But let me get this straight- you are showing how the normal Greenhouse effect works, the same as my grandfathers tomato growing.

Long Term Effects:(a) Succeptibility to other Loonish Ideas(b) Unrecoverable loss of credibility(c) Enhanced risk of publication in Energy and Environment

Succeptibility:Most people are immune to infection. Those at most risk are those with(a) Elevated levels of paranoia, or Conspiracy Syndrome.(b) BS immune deficiency.(c) A grasp of basic physics (just enough rope..)(d) Blog Fever

Early Symptoms:An infected individual will often display the following symptoms within 24 hours:(a) Frequent and fevered claims to the effect of "a cold atmosphere can't warm a hotter surface".(b) Frequent references to the 2nd law of thermodynamics.Within the first week of infection an infected individual can become highly infectious as they propagate the meme to those around them.

Treatment:Recommended treatment involves sustained application of logic to the infected individual. If symptoms still persist after 24 hours of treatment this is usually a sign that the infection is permanent and there is no known cure. Warning signs of permanent infection include rapid switching in the obfuscation cortex leading the individual to discover confusion over words such as "warms", "heats" and "net".

i knew that from the start. it was really fun to have BV make a statement then have bob, capitalclimate et. al. jump all over him for it. BV is a good enough debator (i.e., obfuscator, subject-changer, nit-picker etc...) that i'm sure he's able to convince many laymen you scientists don't know what you're talking about.

we all know scientific consensus is not a true measure of scientific truth. but believe it or not there are still denialists who deny (or at least profess to) the scientific consensus on global warming. that was the popint of my "project jim" idea. no takers, huh? bummer...walter

Would the lab bunnies mind to go back to work once more? The experiment you have shown deals with the greenhouse effect where convection is inhibited. G&T propose to do the experiment using dihydrogen monoxide. Do the lab bunnies have a spare petri dish? I would expect the thermocouple connected to the heater to measure higher temperatures as long as there is H20 inside the petri dish, demonstrating that the backheating really does happen.

I still find it astounding, that G&T neglected latent heat and were not called on it by a referee. Or do review articles on IJMPB bypass referees?

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett, a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny who finally handed in the keys and retired from his wanna be research university. The students continue to be naive but great people and the administrators continue to vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional without Eli's help. Eli notices from recent political developments that this behavior is not limited to administrators. His colleagues retain their curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they, or at least some of them occasionally heeded his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.